It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for
Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire), who is a near constituency neighbour of mine, although I cannot say I am in agreement either with her or with most of her constituents.
This is a very interesting debate. As one listened to the hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), one discovered that Labour Members really had nothing to debate at all. They have accepted the assurances of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State that he would keep the House up to date. They have accepted that there would be no disclosure of material that was in any way damaging to the negotiations. Just to add a cherry to the top of the cake that we are all looking forward to eating in due course, they have accepted a date for the implementation of article 50. Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition have reached the point of such loyalty that they are having an Opposition day debate to back the policy of Her Majesty’s Government.
I think this is a very interesting way of spending our time, and perhaps having the Opposition supporting Government policy will be a new means of forming consensus across Parliament, but one does wonder why they decided to have a day’s debate on this—purely to support the Government—rather than on the other things they could have debated. The answer one comes to is that, when the Government tabled their amendment last night, they cooked the Opposition’s goose. This debate is not really about the form of words used—or even the split infinitive—in Her Majesty’s Opposition’s motion, but about seeking to reject the decision that was made by the British people on 23 June.
That is what underlies every bit of this process. One minute, it is about delay, with hon. Gentlemen and hon. Ladies on the Labour Benches—some even on the Government side—saying, “We are doing it too fast. We should slow down and be a bit more cautious, because it would be so dangerous to do what the British people asked us to do at the pace at which they expected us to do it. Surely that is not wise.” Such people have delayed Brexit through applications to the Court.
Labour Members have also come to Parliament. Oh, how wonderful—what joy that, suddenly, so many of them are in favour of parliamentary scrutiny. When I sat in the Chamber discussing issues sent for debate by the European Scrutiny Committee, were the Benches heaving? Time after time, Labour Members were represented only by their Front-Bench spokesman. In debates in Committee put forward by the European Scrutiny Committee, in which every Member has an entitlement to turn up and be heard, do debates run for the full two and a half hours that they are allotted, or do people try to get through them in about 10 minutes and then go back to signing their Christmas cards? Parliamentary scrutiny has become the watchword of people who held Parliament in contempt. Why do they bring it up? Because they are condescending to the British people: they think the British people got it wrong.